Interesting piece - Clicky.

Interesting stuff, but old news for me really. I've spent most of my working life wishing for faster processors and more hard disk space for photoshop and about four or five years ago, I got it. The new Mac Pros look lovely, but I don't need anything that fast yet.

In the short-term I think he's right. But in the long-term he's being short-sighted, we'll find new uses for the internet which will demand better, revolutionary technology, and the internet won't be just for PCs, it will be for almost every device, with customised 3D browsers or whatever. I think some things like 2D screens are now as good as they can be, but they're not multiple touch-screens etc. Every industry has a period of rapid growth and then incremental improvemnts until the next financial boom or tech revolution.

After a debate in the office, I think Chris is right, in there here and now, it's fine, especially in the economic climate.
In the future, who knows?

There will always be stagnant periods in growth. Once a new tech is developed, there'll be usual race for the best/fastest product before another leap. Look at TVs - they grew in size until widescreen was developed, then grew and grew until flatscreen (Plasma/LCD) came out, which grows and grows, until the next phase.

In the short term, Hardware getting so fast could mean that programmers start to get a bit sloppy and write inneficient programs that require faster hardware to make up for the programmers' laziness.

I think there's a point though, that for 90% of your average home use, the bigger, faster, more effect just doesn't matter.
A machine from the last 3 years, are pretty capable of dealing with whatever people want to do with them.
To a degree, I think the argument that 'Ah, but with a faster chip/board/memory/GPU I spend seconds less each day on a task' doesn't hold much water.
What matters isn't solely the amount of time a process tasks; being sure it's the process in the first place is worth more.
Even if your machine takes 15 minutes longer each day to do something than a newer machine, isn't there something else you can be getting on with?
What does Office 2010 offer me that I've been missing in Office 2004? I can't think of any point that I've bumped up against the limits of that software, as an average user.
The machine I'm writing this on is 6 years old, and does what I need it to - some video work, some writing, some photo editing, some internet.
I can't think of many mainstream applications that need vast leaps forward in terms of our computing ability.

Yeah but that's a blink of an eye though, when all PCs have almost instantaneous solid state hard disks, the modern PCs of today are going to look like relics, everyone's heard of Photoshop these days because everyone can start it as if it was Word, video editing is almost becoming the norm, when older PCs would crawl through that task in a totally unfun way.

As tech improves, our uses for it change, so yes, if our uses didn't change then we wouldn't need faster tech, but our uses will change.

Of course, this is (almost) literally the $64 million question - but what is it that we're going to want to do that we can't do already?
Professional sound and video editing can be conducted in a bedroom. The same goes for 3D modelling and CAD work. The written word - what significant progress has there been there for a decade? Our internet use evolves, old ideas get resurface with a facelift.
I can't conceive of much that's likely on the horizon that'll demand vastly superior processing power. There's a lot of progress made, I suppose perhaps more in tech than elsewhere, that's purely 'because we can', not 'because we need to'.